A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] eBook

Chinese words are transcribed according to the Wade-Giles
system with the exception of names for which already
a popular way of transcription exists (such as Peking).
Place names are written without hyphen, if they remain
readable.

THE EARLIEST TIMES

Chapter One

PREHISTORY

1 Sources for the earliest history

Until recently we were dependent for the beginnings
of Chinese history on the written Chinese tradition.
According to these sources China’s history began
either about 4000 B.C. or about 2700 B.C. with a succession
of wise emperors who “invented” the elements
of a civilization, such as clothing, the preparation
of food, marriage, and a state system; they instructed
their people in these things, and so brought China,
as early as in the third millennium B.C., to an astonishingly
high cultural level. However, all we know of the
origin of civilizations makes this of itself entirely
improbable; no other civilization in the world originated
in any such way. As time went on, Chinese historians
found more and more to say about primeval times.
All these narratives were collected in the great imperial
history that appeared at the beginning of the Manchu
epoch. That book was translated into French,
and all the works written in Western languages until
recent years on Chinese history and civilization have
been based in the last resort on that translation.

Modern research has not only demonstrated that all
these accounts are inventions of a much later period,
but has also shown why such narratives were
composed. The older historical sources make no
mention of any rulers before 2200 B.C., no mention
even of their names. The names of earlier rulers
first appear in documents of about 400 B.C.; the deeds
attributed to them and the dates assigned to them often
do not appear until much later. Secondly, it
was shown that the traditional chronology is wrong
and another must be adopted, reducing all the dates
for the more ancient history, before 900 B.C.
Finally, all narratives and reports from China’s
earliest period have been dealt a mortal blow by modern
archaeology, with the excavations of recent years.
There was no trace of any high civilization in the
third millennium B.C., and, indeed, we can only speak
of a real “Chinese civilization” from 1300
B.C. onward. The peoples of the China of that
time had come from the most varied sources; from 1300
B.C. they underwent a common process of development
that welded them into a new unity. In this sense
and emphasizing the cultural aspects, we are justified
in using from then on a new name, “Chinese”,
for the peoples of China. Those sections, however,
of their ancestral populations who played no part in
the subsequent cultural and racial fusion, we may
fairly call “non-Chinese”. This distinction
answers the question that continually crops up, whether
the Chinese are “autochthonons”. They
are autochthonons in the sense that they formed a
unit in the Far East, in the geographical region of
the present China, and were not immigrants from the
Middle East.